Sunday, November 18, 2012

Foreword

I bought a Raspberry Pi a few months ago with the intent to have a toy web server at home. It's cheap (~$30), low-power (~3W), and doesn't need a cooling fan, so it's the ideal toy server that I won't feel bad about running 24/7. It has an ARM processor instead of the more common x86 processor, so you can only install certain OSes on it. Windows, Mac OSX, or most distributions of GNU Linux are normally compiled to create binaries that execute on x86 processors, so these can't be used. The Linux kernel can be compiled to create ARM binaries, so certain Linux distributions are compatible with this small computer. The OS that was custom-made for this small computer is called Raspbian, which is what I am using, but you can also install other OSes, including Android, Fedora, and XBMC.

I don't have an HDMI computer display, nor an HDMI adapter, so I will be setting up my web server by sending terminal commands via SSH. Some people may be off-put by the terminal, but I'll try to stay organized so we don't get lost.

I spent a lot of time reading about the details of networking, remote administration, and web server setup and best practices. This project is certainly the entrance to a rabbit hole of other interesting details you don't normally think about on a daily basis. Even though I spent a terrible amount of time, I gained a great deal of satisfaction.

Prerequisites

I performed a bit of setup before starting this project, so you may need to:

Download and install the Raspbian OS onto an SD card

Play around a bit on the OS, read the provided introductory Linux documentation

Install some packages you like using apt-get, such as Git

Connect power to the Raspberry Pi and connect it to your home network

Connect your laptop via ethernet to same network as Raspberry Pi

Before we can begin, we must connect our Raspbery Pi to our network, as stated in the prerequisites.

Our first step is to ensure we can interface with our Raspberry Pi's OS. I will not be using a keyboard, mouse, or monitor directly connected to the device, instead I will be interfacing with it by sending terminal commands to it by using SSH. The device declares a default hostname of raspberrypi, which the local network can use to uniquely identify your device. This is very convenient because we don't have to find the IP address that the router assigned to it, we only have to request raspberrypi from the network to send it requests. If you want to change the device's hostname, there are ways to this.

Connect to your Raspberry Pi with SSH

From your laptop, open a terminal and enter ssh pi@raspberrypi, where pi is the name of the user account you want to use.

Enter your password, which is raspberry by default.

Your current directory is the pi user's home directory. Any subsequent commands will be executed on the Raspberry Pi.

Type exit to quit your SSH session.

Install a Web Server

There are a number of web server applications out there, such as Apache, Nginx, lighttpd, and Jetty. Apache is by far the most popular web server, so you may want to try that, but I'll be using Nginx because I like to feel unique. Actually, I can think of a good reason: Rumors say that Nginx has a small memory footprint. This is a good match for a low-memory computer like the Raspberry Pi.

Install the Nginx package from the default Raspbian repositories.

Just to verify we don't already have Nginx on this device, type which nginx into the SSH terminal. It should give us no result.

Update our apt-get sources by typing sudo apt-get update

Just to verify that Nginx is in the default repositories, type apt-cache search nginx. We should see several results, including the simply-named 'nginx' package.

Install the Nginx package by typing sudo apt-get install nginx.

Validate that Nginx is installed

Type service --status-all. We should see an entry called 'nginx'.

Web Server Security

We just set up an application on our computer that we intend to welcome requests from the rest of the internet, which can be quite dangerous, so let's add some security. Like a good parent, we need to tell our web server to not talk to strangers. Because this is one of my first web servers, I will refer to the web server security guide on Linode for all security advice, mostly because it seems to be well-written.

Because some people make their careers as penetration specialists, I have always been curious about server protection best practices. Some of the protection I will set up may be redundant in a home server situation, but it is never redundant if new knowledge is gained! If I'm missing some important steps, please tell me - I would love to know!

Secure User Accounts

My Raspberry Pi had a default user named 'pi' which I have been using. One concern with web servers is that if a hacker gains control of a web request process, it can run under the same user permissions as the process owner. I want to ensure that Nginx request handling processes be owned by a limited-permissions user.

Before that, we have one more important change: Change the default password of the default user. We will later expose this server's SSH port to the public internet, and an stranger on the internet might try a set of default username/passwords.

Change the default password of the default user

Open an SSH terminal into your Raspberry Pi

Type passwd pi to change the password for the device's default user account.

Enter the existing password, the new password twice, and hit enter to save the change.

Nginx is a master process that spawns worker processes to handle multiple web requests. The Apache community says that the 'www-data' user should handle web requests, so we'll do the same. While the Nginx master process runs as 'root' user, each worker process runs as the 'nobody' user by default. The worker process owner can be customized in the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file.

Ensure web request processes run as limited-permission user

Open an SSH terminal into your Raspberry Pi

Enter the following command to check the Nginx default user: nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.

Ensure the first line of this configuration file is user www-data;.

Use SSH key pair authentication instead of passwords

On your laptop, open a terminal

Generate an SSH key pair by typing ssh-keygen

Set up a Firewall

We should also set up a firewall to protect our computer from port scanners and other malicious programs. A firewall is basically a set of rules that limits or blocks incoming or outgoing web requests. After a bit of research, it seems that a tool called iptables is the most popular solutions for this. It is also the solution proposed Linode's server security guide.

The Raspberry Pi firmware version that I have isn't compiled with iptables support, so you may have to upgrade your firmware first. Luckily, it was is simple as a few terminal commands if we use the rpi-update tool that a user named Hexxah has created.

Defend Against Brute-force Attacks

One more thing we should be worried about is internet users attempting to access our SSH account by trying a dictionary attack against our password. There is a handy utility called Fail2Ban that monitors your log files for failed login attempts and temporarily blocks offending users.

You can do different customization, but I just followed the recommendations of these code snippets to add Nginx monitoring to Fail2Ban.

Secure SSH

I told my firewall to allow traffic through port 22, which is SSH. This means anybody, not only I, can try to SSH into my Raspberry Pi. To better secure this, we have already took two good steps: 1) changed the password for the default user, and 2) protect from brute-force attacks. But I want to do one more thing.

Restrict root for SSH

sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Change the PermitRootLogin line like this:

PermitRootLogin without-password

Update the Server's Software

A best practice for server admins is to ensure all server software is kept up-to-date. This is really easy in a Linux system like this, so there's no excuse. You should do this about once a month, or whenever you think of it.

Update all installed packages

Open an SSH session with your Raspberry Pi.

Update your index of available packages and versions by running sudo apt-get update.

Request a Page from Your Private Web Server

I am fine with the default setup. I just changed it to listen on port 8080.

Start the server

Open an SSH terminal and run this on the Raspberry Pi: sudo service nginx start.

Check the web server

The default static web directory is /usr/share/nginx/www/.

Open a browser on your laptop and navigate to raspberrypi in a web browser. You should see the default index.html file created by Nginx, which says something like "Welcome to Nginx!".

Request a Page from Your Public Web Server

The final hurdle is to make your Raspberry Pi accessible to the rest of the world. My router is not forwarding requests to the Raspberry Pi, so we will need to do some port forwarding. I added the DD-WRT firmware to my router quite a while ago, so you may need to find a more specific guide for adding port forwarding for your specific router.

Make Server Visible by Public IP Address

Even with the port forwards, my web server still wasn't accessible by its public IP. With a friend's help, I tried putting it into my router's DMZ, which fixed the problem. It seems the purpose of a DMZ machine is to be the middle ground between your trusted/local network and the enemy/public network. This makes the DMZ machine almost wholly visible to the public internet. You may also want to try this on your router if you are having problems.

Put your server in your router's DMZ.

I have DD-WRT firmware on my router, so your steps may be different.

Open the web UI for your router by navigating to its IP address in a web browser.

Go to the NAT/QoS tab, then the DMZ tab.

Set Use DMZ field to Enable.

Set the internal IP of your web server in the DMZ Host IP Address field.

We now have our Raspberry Pi visible to the rest of the world on ports 80, 443, and 8080. Congratulations. Try sending a request to your web server by its public IP. You can find your public IP by using an internet site like IpChicken. If your external IP address is 123.45.67.890, then enter 123.45.67.890:8080 into your web browser to get the default Nginx index.html page.

Add Dynamic IP Solution: No-IP

My public IP address changes quite often, so it's impossible for me to SSH into my Raspberry Pi from work. To solve this, I wanted a domain name that points to my changing IP address. A technique called Dynamic DNS can help me. This involves registering a domain name with a third-party and periodically updating my server's registered IP address with a simple app. The third-party I chose to use is called No-IP. The No-IP updater app is built-in to some routers, so you should check there first. My router has this capability, which is filed under a category called DDNS, but it isn't working. So, I want to try installing the app on my Raspberry Pi. Let's give it a try.

During compilation, you will be prompted for your noip.com username and password, as well as a refresh interval (I chose 30)

Conclusion

That was quite an educational project. I have a new appreciation for managed web hosts, because I believe they are responsible for managing the server's security, network visibility, kernel upgrades, etc.

I will be following this tutorial, which was presented at Dreamforce 2012. This training session was wonderfully presented by Anand B Narasimhan @anand_bn and Richard Vanhook @richardvanhook. I wanted to condense this 2+ hour session into just the steps required to make a Spring app on Heroku.

(Note: This article was my first attempt at using markdown as a formatting engine. I grabbed the HTML and pasted it into Blogger, then fixed some spacing. Markdown limits you to six choices for headings, bullet point and number lists, and horizontal rules, so it's kinda restrictive. At this time, I'm not sure how to format this article better, so any tips would be nice.)

Project templates are gold, and save hours of frustration and configuration.
I have been horrified by the time required to go from an empty project to a working application in Java.

Embedded web container seems like a great idea. If system/environment admins don't have to set up the web server, there is less risk for failure when deploying to different environments. Moving one thing is so much easier than moving two things and ensuring they cooperate.

The project template uses a Java library called RichSobjects for talking to Salesforce. I haven't heard of this library before, but I'm making a mental note to check it out later if I need a Salesforce API library.

To set up the plugin, go to Window > Preferences and find the Heroku section on the left.

You will need a Heroku account, which is free. I made an account by using this wizard.

Get a Heroku API key by entering your Heroku credentials in the Email and Password fields and clicking Login.

The Heroku Plugin found my SSH key, because it is in a default location. If it's empty, follow the Heroku guide above to generate a public/private RSA key pair. Then return to the Heroku settings in Eclipse to generate an SSH key.

Create new Heroku app

Note: You can import an existing Heroku app by going to File > Import and selecting Heroku.
However, I will be creating a new app through Heroku.

Tell Eclipse to set up a new Heroku project for you by going to File > New > Project...
and select the Create Heroku App from Template.

Select Force.com connected Java app with Spring,OAuth and leave Application Name blank, as this name must be unique across all Heroku apps. If it's blank, Heroku will create a cool name for you.

This sends a request to Heroku to set up an app for you and puts all the code in a git repository that Heroku manages.

Eclipse will clone this Git repo locally and expose it as an Eclipse project.

Inspect what we have

This is a Maven project, so look at pom.xml to see dependencies:

Spring

spring-context

spring-webmvc

jstl

standard

javax.servlet-api

Salesforce

richsobjects-core

richsobjects-api-jersey-client

richsobjects-cache-memcached

force-oauth

force-springsecurity

Tomcat

webapp-runner

Logging

jcl-over-slf4j

slf4j-simple

There are many code files and settings files in this project, so it's hard to see what's going on. This is different from Force.com applications, in which only code is exposed to the developer, and settings are normally in the environment and changed in the UI. So, instead of looking at each component of this Java application, we are going to look at code at just the highest-level.

To see code that calls Force.com, see ContactController.java:

Class annotations (@Controller and @RequestMapping) are part of the Spring framework. These
instruct the framework where to inject framework code at runtime. This keeps code clean.

This class uses the RichSobjects library to interact with Sobjects in a Salesforce database
by using the Partner API.

To see the HTML page template we will request, see contacts.jsp:

Pretty simple: it's HTML which has JSP tags, which the HTTP request handler will resolve into HTML for the user.

To see global variables for the Spring app, see applicationContext.xml:

Most values are hard-coded in this file. However, look at lines 29-33 to see yet-unresolved values. These values will be drawn from the Heroku environment, I believe.

Heroku uses idea of an embedded web container. Instead of running a web deamon as an OS process, and the Java app as a separate OS process, we unify the two pieces. We can instantiate the Tomcat web server from our Java program, using a Java wrapper called webapp-runner.

webapp-runner makes app deployment and app start very simple.

Jetty is another web server that is popular to use as an embedded server.

Find the name of your app, which we allowed Heroku to decide. If it was funny-name-1234,
navigate to this URL to see that the app is already running on Heroku:

funny-name-1234.herokuapp.com

Set up local build for OAuth

This application is currently set up to use OAuth to gain access to data in a Salesforce org. By default, Salesforce will not allow OAuth applications to request access, so we have to add an exception, that is, define an accessible application.

To allow an external application to request access to a Salesforce org:

Choose any name in the Application field for this record. I chose Heroku Local.

Choose any email for Contact Email field.

Use http://localhost:8080/_auth for the Callback URL field.

Click Save.

Navigate to the detail view of this Remote Access record to see that Salesforce
generated a Consumer Key and a Consumer Secret.

To set up our project to run locally in Eclipse, instead of only on Heroku:

Set up a Run configuration by going to Run > Run Configurations...

Select Java Application from the list on the left and click the plus icon at the top of this list.

Choose a name for this Run configuration. I chose 'web app runner'.

Enter your project name in the Project field, which looks like funny-name-1234.

Choose the main class for the Main Class field, which is webapp.runner.launch.Main for this project.

Go to the Arguments tab, and enter src/main/webapp in the Program Arguments field.

This application uses environment variables for OAuth. We will specify this at run-time by going to the Environment tab. This app is expecting two keys, "SFDC_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID", and "SFDC_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET".

Click New.

Name = SFDC_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID

Value = (value of Consumer Key field from Remote Access record we just created)

Save this and click New.

Name = SFDC_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET

Value = (value of Consumer Secret field from Remote Access record we just created)

Save this.

Click Run.

After performing these steps and pressing Run, the application should be running locally on port 8080.
We can see this by navigating to the http://localhost:8080 URL in a web browser. To check that our OAuth has been set up correctly, navigate to http://localhost:8080/sfdc/Contacts URL. The app will redirect to a Salesforce authentication page, where you should click Allow. You will then be redirected back to the same URL in your authentication.

Setup Heroku app for OAuth

We added run-time variables to our environment by adding them to the Run Configuration in Eclipse.
To add these variables to our app when it is running on Heroku, we must add them to another settings
location in Eclipse that gets pushed to Heroku.

Choose any name in the Application field for this record. I used the name of
Heroku app, Heroku Funny Name.

Choose any email for Contact Email field.

Use https://funny-name-1234.herokuapp.com/_auth for the Callback URL field.

Click Save.

Navigate to the detail view of this Remote Access record to see that Salesforce
generated a Consumer Key and a Consumer Secret.

Open the Heroku settings for this Heroku project:

In Eclipse, click Window > Show View > Other...

Choose My Heroku Applications.

Right-click on your application in this view, and select App Info.

To add new environment variables to this Heroku app, choose the Environment Variables tab
from this file.

Click the + button on the right.

Key = SFDC_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID

Value = (value of Consumer Key field from Remote Access record we just created)

Save this and click New.

Key = SFDC_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET

Value = (value of Consumer Secret field from Remote Access record we just created)

After adding these environment variables, the Heroku app should be immediately updated to
reflect the values. If you navigate to the Contacts URL of your Heroku app, funny-name-1234.herokuapp.com/sfdc/Contacts, you can see that the OAuth is now working.

Add New Feature to Your App

To show how to add a new feature to the app, we will be adding a link to each contact's Twitter
handle. Follow these steps to add this new feature.

1) Add a new custom field to the Contact object:

Login to the same Salesforce org.

Go to Setup > Customize > Contacts > Fields. Click New and create a new text field
called TwitterHandle__c.

Save this.

2) Query this field in our local copy of the Java project:

In Eclipse, open ContactsController.java.

In the listContacts method, add TwitterHandle__c to the Select clause of the query.

Save this file.

3) Expose this field value in the JSP page:

In Eclipse, open contacts.jsp.

Add a new header column to this table by adding <th>Twitter Handle</th> to line 13,
underneath the Email header.

Expose the field value in the table cells by adding <td>${contact.getField("TwitterHandle__c").value}</td>
to line 27, underneath the similar row for Email.

Save this file.

4) Test this change in the local build of the project:

Stop the server by opening the Console view in Eclipse and clicking the red stop button.

Run a new build, which will have our Twitter handle column in the Contacts page by clicking
the Run button underneath the toolbar, which looks like a green arrow.

Navigate to the URL for this local page, which should be http://localhost:8080/sfdc/contacts.

5) To commit these changes locally:

Right-click on your project in the Package Explorer in Eclipse, select Team > Commit.

Add a commit message which describes the changes, and click Commit.

6) To push these local changes to our Heroku repository:

Right-click on your project in the Package Explorer in Eclipse, select Team > Push to Upstream.

Managing Your App

Check status of app

Go to My Heroku Applications view in Eclipse.

Right-click on one of your apps, and click View Logs to see last 1500 log lines
for your app in production.

Heroku made a thing called "Logplex". All messages that your app produces can
be accessed here. You can find third-party apps to derive information from these logs.

Scale your app up and down

Free dev accounts have only one dyno.

To scale app to >1 dynos, must tie money to account, for example, by joining
app to Heroku org with money.

Right-click on one of your apps in My Heroku Applications, click Scale and choose 3.
Your app is now on a 3-node, load-balanced cluster.

Add collaborators

Go to My Heroku Applications in Eclipse and click App Info.

Go to the Collaborators tab to see all other users in your Heroku organization.

Either select one of these users or click the plus button on the right to add by email.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Software Inheritance

As a software engineer, as you spend more time in the profession, you will continually see software structured differently from how you would do it. Sometimes, you are just confused by the author's code, other times you understand and disagree with it, and yet other times you become so inspired by it that adopt its design. Recently, I've come across object-oriented code that makes heavy use of inheritance in its solution, and I have been actively confused by it due to its difficult reading level. I think I am finally coming to understand how to read code written in the inheritance style, and I'd like to share what I've found.

Initial Issues - Internal State

When first encountering inheritance, I interpreted it on a shallow level. I saw the 'extends' keyword, which means it 'inherits' from the specified class and can reference its variables and methods, but I never understood how its utilization could justify the higher maintenance cost of its slurred readability.

The first issue I had with reading inheritance-based code is sharing class properties. When I create a new class, I design it to minimize references to internal state. I use static methods as much as possible. Why? Those class properties are variables, unless they use 'final' keyword, and without foresight for possible values of these class properties, your methods can produce unexpected results.

So consider my surprise to see references to a base class' internal properties from an inheriting class! What could the author be thinking? Are you really sure you trust that that class-external variable will always be a valid value for your class? Holy buckets, Batman, this inheritance business seems to be a bucket of holes!

Towards Better Understanding

I was reading some Javascript code recently for an Ajax-y framework. The base of the app uses John Resig's simple Javascript inheritance, and subsequent objects extend from this base Class type. It seemed that the author was so influenced by inheritance that he wanted to force it into Javascript before considering his solution. I understood inheritance on a shallow level, but still - what is so necessary about inheritance?

After some research, I think I'm starting to understand the case for inheritance. The explanation offered on this Wikipedia page on Differential Inheritance was quite inspirational.

"To think of differential inheritance, you think in terms of what is different. So for instance, when trying to describe to someone how Dumbo looks, you could tell them in terms of elephants: Think of an elephant. Now Dumbo is a lot shorter, has big ears, no tusks, a little pink bow and can fly. Using this method, you don't need to go on and on about what makes up an elephant, you only need to describe the differences; anything not explicitly different can be safely assumed to be the same." - Wikipedia: Differential Inheritance

Ah, from this point of view, inheritance is a convenient way of saying "I need a class just like that one, but a little different." In other words, it is a programmer's feature for convenient customization. A bonus feature is that the inheriting class can be used in place of the base class by using type casting. (Short thought - isn't this ability better performed by using interfaces and a platform that accepting registering custom handlers?)

Issue Still Remains

While I do have a better understanding of inheritance now, my problem still exists: If MyClass inherits from BaseClass, I can't look at MyClass on its own because most of the real logic exists in BaseClass! This doesn't help when debugging these two classes, since BaseClass was designed to run one way, and MyClass might be changing the behavior of BaseClass in an incompatible manner. Sure, this may work, but it feels a bit fragile and unnecessary. I wonder if my understanding of the benefits of inheritance-utilizing code will grow as I continue to read it, but I hope it isn't a poison that infects my style.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

My career choice is a software engineer, a knowledge-based career. While it is easy to show a product for the time I spend writing software, it isn't so easy for time studying it. With studied knowledge, I may be able to hold more intelligent discussions about software engineering, but if I disappear tomorrow, will my time investment in reading about it have any lasting impact on the world around me? No - all that knowledge is locked inside my head. This is where blogging can be so important, and why I value it.

From Studying to Building

I haven't been blogging much lately, which doesn't please me. Why haven't I been blogging? When I was regularly blogging, the process was composed of spending time studying software topics, then transferring my realizations into blog posts. A month or two ago, I started writing a software tool to help develop and deploy Force.com code, and I stopped studying software topics. I haven't completed a useful piece of software before, not including the one-off solutions I write for my job, and I wanted to test my abilities to see if I am able to actually write something useful on my own. As I continued with the project, I found my abilities to be lacking, which surprised and angered me.

And so my obsession was triggered. If I can't write a simple little software tool like this, can I really call myself a skilled software engineer? I think I can't. A simple tool like this shouldn't be so difficult, and yet I can't finish it or reach a useful state! When I'm not banging my head against my laptop screen in frustration when hacking on this code, I'm thinking about how the failed project trumpets my ineptitude. Since starting, it has consumed most of my free evenings, and my obsession with this code leaves me unable to study the higher aspects of software engineering, leaving me with no material for my blog. If only I can finish this program, I will have evidence that I can write useful software, and I will be able to forget the huge time investment I made.

Expectations of Studying vs Building

Stepping back to see this, I find myself at a crossroads, deciding which road to choose in the future. Should I be a higher-level software engineer, concerned with small steps of enlightenment that are easily serialized into blog posts, or should I be a software hacker, who gains skills writing real software but has difficulty serializing gained knowledge in blog posts?

Or am I drawing another false dichotomy? Probably so. So how is studying different from building, such that I feel like time can be wasted in one but not the other? The time spent building a program that can't be finished and can't be used - is is time wasted? It sure feels like wasted time when you don't reach your expectations and feel like a failure. Contrast this with pure study; When you study something, you are searching for answers to questions, rarely committed enough to feel failure. So perhaps this is the only difference between the two - expectations.

This will be the conclusion from today's introspection. Either study or building is a valid way to grow, learn, and improve, but building may have the ability to cause deeper emotions.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

I work in a company with other developers. Whether we are on the same project or not, we are on the same team and we need to support each other. Since I started working at Sundog ~14 months ago, I've working solely with Salesforce, doing custom Force.com development. I've gotten pretty accustomed to the limits and boundaries of the platform, and I feel that I'm pretty good with it.

A coworker has been maintaining a rather large legacy Java web application by himself for the last >2 years. It's been decided that its time to shift another developer into his position, and that person shall be me. He was getting pretty sick of being the lone developer on old code. As he has been setting up my environment and training me in over the last week, I can almost see the weights as they are lowered from his shoulders. He's a great software engineer who has been trapped by misfortune for a long time, so I'm happy to step in so he can move onto something else.

As a company, we have been pretty poor about shifting teams. Some people grew so tired of being the only person who can something, and they have left the company because of it. These employees are called knowledge silos, and this is inherently a bad thing. If only one employee knows how to manage an important system, or only one employee can use a certain software tool, the company will be screwed when that employee leaves. It would take months before they can find another person with a similar skill-set, and even longer for that person to catch up to where his predecessor left off.

So yes, I'll be using Java, and re-learning how to program since I haven't used it in a long time. I've learned how to set up a local web application server, OC4J, and how painful they are to boot, configure, and manage. I've learned how to set up and use a 'real, enterprise' IDE, IntelliJ, to edit, deploy, and debug Java projects. I still need to learn a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts and IDE quirks. I will continue to learn about OS-level frameworks, specifically, Struts and Spring, and their models of handling HTTP requests. I will study up on OOP design patterns, and I will have to review the advanced language features that are available to use in Java (I'm familiar with Salesforce's Apex, which is Java Lite).

I have mixed feelings about this change in positions for me. I am happy to learn about different MVC frameworks and how a real debugger works (I haven't hardcore used one before). However, I am truly worried that I will be doing Java maintenance for the foreseeable future (RE: >1 year). I really don't want to be off by myself again, separated from the forward direction that the company is taking into cloud and mobile platforms. I am really worried that doing pure maintenance like this for a full year will destroy my passion and motivation for software engineering, design, and language theory. Here's to hoping I can keep my chin up. (￣ω￣')

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

This post is an open complaint towards Salesforce's certification process. This is quite a long post, and you may thing that it is a rant. Well, it very well may be a rant, but these are opinions that must be expressed, and I will gladly take the podium at this time because I haven't heard anyone else complain. I need to discuss a few of Salesforce's terrible certification practices: inconsistent terminology and poor feedback.

The first area of fault that I want to point out is Salesforce's inconsistent terminology. I'm sure you know what I mean if you've studied for or taken any certification exams. I've taken a few Salesforce certification multiple choice exams, the Developer Certification and the Advanced Developer Certification exam. Both of these multiple choice exams were filled with questions that were trickily worded and had choices that were equally as tricky worded. Rather than testing the candidates knowledge and understanding of concepts, these exams seemed to be testing the candidates ability to remember key Salesforce terminology. Salesforce often uses multiple words to describe the same thing, and uses the same words to describe other things as well, and on top of this, they are inconsistent with the usage of this terminology. To test candidates on this inconsistent terminology is a terrible practice.

To move onto the main complaint of this post, I want to discuss Salesforce's feedback on their certification exams. In short, there is none. If you fail an exam, you are not told how close you were to passing, nor were you told in what areas you did poorly. This is key information! It encourages more studying for the next time, and it provides a foothold for that candidate to use to attempt to pass the test next time. Without feedback, taking these tests is like running full speed into a wall. The wall either busts and you pass through, or you fall flat on your backside. You may start to feel insane after feeling the pain of failure three times in a row.

To continue on this point, I want to extend this complaint from written exams to hand-graded exams. If you fail a multiple choice exam, you will certainly remember some of the questions from the exam. Some may intrigue or confuse you and inspire you to research and remember them later. But consider the case of submitting a programming assignment for human review, or giving a presentation before a panel of judges, which are situations one will encounter when attempting Advanced Developer or Salesforce Architect certification. I've failed the Advanced Developer Certification programming assignment once before now, and they did provide feedback to me. However, this feedback seemed to have been computer-generated or mistaken, because when I read the feedback, I have no idea about what part of my code they are marking as a mistake. Moreover, their feedback does not help me to improve!

To provide specific details about the poor feedback Salesforce provides, I'll provide a few excerpts from my last programming assignment results.

"The design approach taken is suboptimal and does not demonstrate an understanding of triggers, order of execution, and platform design principles on the platform." - I'm sorry, but I believe that I am a very pragmatic programmer and that I am *very* familiar with the Salesforce platform. When I read this, I think back on much of the example code I read in Salesforce documentation, and how inefficient and poor they are. So these same Salesforce experts think that my code is very poor? I care a great deal about writing maintainable and efficient code! If they think my code is terrible, point out my mistakes! I would love to fix them and improve the code I write on your platform! Seriously! what code are they looking at?

"Areas for Improvement: Use of aggregate queries" - I am well aware of SOQL's aggregate query functionality, but I found not a single place in the application where it makes sense to use aggregate queries. If they told me that I as required to use an aggregate query, just to demonstrate my knowledge of them, instead of using a single query to get the records I need and looping over them, I could have easily added a second (precious) query just to use an aggregate. I didn't even consider this, however, since Salesforce's governor limits force developers to minimize the number of SOQL queries.

"Areas for Improvement: Conforming to governor limits" - Uh... what? What actionable item or lesson learned can I take away from this? Every single one of my methods were "bulkified", and accept only collections as parameters! What code are YOU looking at!

"Strengths: Developing scalable code to handle bulk operations" - What! You just told me that my code is inefficient and doesn't conform to governor limits! Now you tell me that my code is wonderfully scalable?

In this final paragraph, I want to give a voice to the feedback process of the Salesforce Architect certification. My co-worker, not I, took this exam, so I'm reporting second-hand information. He paid thousands of dollars and took time off of work to fly to San Francisco to give a presentation before a panel of judges. They gave him a book of backstory and requirements for integrating an external system with Salesforce and allowed ~60 minutes to architect his solution and prepare his solution for presentation. 60 minutes is hardly a practical amount of time to solidly architect a thing of that scale! To add insult to injury, when he received the results via email the following week, which informed him of his failure, they provided no explanation, justification, or areas of improvement. How can he prepare to take this exam again the next time? How can he justify spending thousands of dollars again and not be able to promise improved odds of success? It is quite hard to justify attempting this exam again, no matter how important it is.

For consulting companies like my own, certifications are a necessary way to prove to new and existing clients that we legitimately understand the technology. Therefore, to improve our position relative to competitors, we strongly encouraging our employees to obtain as many Salesforce certifications as possible. I don't mind getting certified, because it makes me a more employable person, and I also personally want to be awesome at my profession. So, even though a certification process is incredible painful, people like me will be forced to continue banging our heads into walls.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Continuation from previous post. It was written on a caffeine high, so I thought I was saving the world, and this post would be the roadmap to salvation.

Alright, problem: the user clicked the "next" button/link, now our Javascript app needs to load new content.
Link the button to a Javascript function called UpdateContentRequest. What does this function do? We want this function to do everything necessary to update the page to show this new content. This requires a few steps.
First, it has to request the new content from the server. This isn't too difficult if we use jQuery's snack function. A more flexible solution is to make the content available via a REST interface and use a Javascript REST framework. What do we do after we get it? We can either store it locally, either in a variable or in the HTML5 LocalStore. The other option is to immediately render it to the page without storing it long-term.

This brings us to the next step. Once we have the data, how do we render it to the page easily and appropriately? This also shouldn't be too difficult if we use the right tools. It's easy to know where to place this new data using Javascript if we use an id attribute to mark the parent element of the content - call it "blogContentWrapper" or something. The other tool to use is a Javascript templating language. There are many of these out there, such as jQuery templates, handlebars, or mustache, so just pick your favorite. These tools allow you to write an HTML template with a few holes, then inject data into this template to dynamically produce the marked-up content. Just take this marked-up content and replace the current child of the "blogContentWrapper" with it.

Wow, this sounds so easy. The hard part is to make this library flexible so it can be used for a number of types of websites while keeping it easy to use and powerful. I'll need to consider the use cases for this library and then reconsider the level of abstraction to use. Also, Google supports crawling Ajax websites like this, so I'll need to consider their requirements to keep this library compatible.

Single page web apps. I am very happy when I visit a site that subscribes to this philosophy because they at very responsive. A philosophy? Yes, I think it is a philosophy. Can we call it a philosophy if its followers advocate it as a way to avoid wastefulness? While single page web sites are a wonderful solution when creating a few types of web sites, it isn't the best choice for others types. Ignore that while we discuss the wastefulness that single page web sites solve.

Website wastefulness? What waste, exactly? What I am thinking about is the site's entire HTML markup, Javascript, and CSS styling must be resent to the browser for each request. Sure, client-side browser caching may help reduce the wasteful resource requests here, but we shouldn't depend on the client to optimize this when the website developer has the power to optimize the user's experience.

How can the website developer optimize this? Make the web site a Javascript app! Send this Javascript app on the initial page load, then delegate each subsequent page request to the Javascript app. How will the Javascript app do this? It will request just the new content from the server and place it on the page. Using this method, we are only grabbing the new content that the user wants, not all the resources and markup for the page. Efficient! And fast!

I haven't figured out how to architect this Javascript framework, but I'm sure it would be worth the time investment. Maybe there is an existing framework that does most of this, or even some of it.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

In my last post, I explained my recent shift in priorities, which resulted in one of my hobbies, Chinese language learning, moving to number one position. I spent ~2 months studying Chinese in preparation for my vacation to Taiwan by myself, to test myself by seeing how much of a language one can learn in two months.

How did I score on my self-test? Not as good as I hoped, but still successful. While I was only able to understand a few words of each sentence, I wasn't able to grasp much meaning. I *was* successful in communicating on a few occasions. I was city-walking, trying to find the hiking path to the top of a large hill. I stopped a guy walking on the street with a "dui bu qi" (excuse me) and explained that "wo xiang qu zhe li" (I want to go here) and pointed to my map. Success! He spoke some fast Chinese that I didn't understand, but he also used hand motions! Straight ahead and left! Alright! I found the mountain, but got couldn't find the hiking trail to go up.

I saw another bored-looking guy, so I asked him "wo xiang qu shang" (I want to go up). I hoped my language didn't sound like a caveman with such simple sentences. I guess my tones were right, because he didn't look offended as if I had insulted his mother. He also used hand motions! Success!

I spent some time in Japan, and made a good friend who is from central Taiwan. I took the opportunity to meet up with her again, and I spent a few days with her family. Her family was very welcoming toward me. They had a car! This was so nice to see after city-walking in Taipei for 5 days. They took me to a few of their favorite restaurants. Real chinese food is not street food? Trip-changing experience! Home-made food is what? Noodles, rice, and veggies! So interesting! They drove me to a mountain where some of the best Oolong tea is made. How educational! I didn't know Oolong tea could be so delicious! And I didn't know what tea fields look like. Rows of bushes on hillsides in the clouds! Beautiful, educational!

I felt so bad about not being able to make fulfilling meal-time conversation. I wish I could have told them what my life was like, and what I found interesting about their lives. I wish I could have thanked them in better Chinese. I hope my gestures and thoughts of thanks were picked up by their sense of empathy. If I say "xie xie" (thank you) five times in a row, does that properly mean "Thanks! I owe you so much, and your home and family is so awesome! I had so much fun!"? I sure hope they got the message.

The one part of the language that I totally failed at? Ordering food. At most of the restaurants I visited in Taiwan, there are no pictures of food you can use to decide what to order. There's a sheet of paper with a grid on it. One column of the grid is filled with Chinese words for foods. The other column is for you to place checkmarks. This is broken up into categories. So, if McDonald's used this concept (they totally should), to order a burger, you need to take a sheet of paper, and put a checkmark next to 'hamburger', 'cheese', 'pickles', 'bacon', and 'lettuce', and don't forget to put a checkmark next to 'fries'. This is a very efficient way to order, I think, but if you can read *none* of the words, you just put checkmarks next random words that you like - Maybe a word has a simple letter or it's one that you recognize. More than once, I was surprised by what I got, and I still have no idea how to order it again. I need to learn more food words next time I travel to Taiwan or China.

Most of 2011 has seen me diligently studying the art of software development. It's a very deep topic that could keep me occupied for the rest of my life. I'm lucky to be able to work and stay interested in such a deep discipline. I've developed a few other interested in the second half of 2011, one of which is the Chinese language. A recent development has caused me to push my Chinese studies up to number one, ahead of software studies. This means that I won't be blogging about software for awhile. :( This kind of saddens me because I enjoy software, and investing time in it will help me out in my career as well. But, as with investments, it is smart to diversify. If the software industry dries up (can't imagine why) or my life changes drastically and I lose interest in it, my trump card will be useless. So onwards to investing time in hobbies.

Why Chinese? Why *not* Chinese? I've learned that you shouldn't have to justify your interests; it is an indescribable force that captures ones interests and it should be trusted.

Well, maybe I can find a small influence for the development of this interest. I had been building up vacation days, so I had to start thinking about what to do with them. While it would be nice in the short term, spending a week in a tropical paradise didn't suit me. I needed something that I could explore and learn about. After much thought, I decided on two ways to use my vacation time most effectively: a) Travel to a fun city that also has a software conference to attend, or b) Learn a new language and travel to a place that speaks it as a test for myself.

Which did I choose? Well, if I can decide on a good conference to go to, my company would pay for me to attend it - no need to spend my vacation time. So I decided to test myself. I bought a round trip ticket to Taiwan, scheduled for 2 months in the future, and attempted to learn as much Chinese as I could in two months.

How much Chinese did I learn before departing? I was pretty motivated during those two months. I may write another blog post detailing my strategy, which proved to be pretty effect, but I can summarize it here. I listened to many hours of basic Chinese phrases in situations. I had to listen to each lesson ~5 times before I was able to pick up any words. Separately, I started doing flashcards. It is pretty easy to find flashcards for all the basic Chinese, such as 'Thank you", "Goodbye", "This is delicious", and "Where's the bathroom". I tried to learn ~20 new words each day (probably more in reality). I think I had completed a deck of 500 words before leaving, and crammed another 200 on the flight to Taiwan (it was a long flight).

Read part two of this post here, where I tell stories about the few times that my Chinese studies paid off.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

2011 has ended and 2012 begins. I sure hope I'm not the same person that I was 1 year ago. So how have I changed? Where have I improved? What new skill have I learned? What is my living situation and happiness level?

I've learned a lot in the last year. I'd like to document a few of the things here, so I can fondly look on it at a later time.

Separating presentation from data on a web page.
I spent a few weeks this year lightly researching client-side web applications, even creating a prototype web application that is highly responsive using Backbone.js. This is one part of software that I thought I would never understand because of Javascript, Ajax, and talking across the network, so I'm pretty proud of this one.

MVC and other presentation patterns.
While I'm still not an expert in this area, I think my knowledge is now greater than a large percentage of my peers. I don't have a single piece of software to demonstrate my new-found knowledge, which is true for much of what I learn, this knowledge will make itself evident in other software I write moving forward. Varieties of MVC are present in most areas of software engineering now, iOS, Android, web pages, and desktop applications, they all use a variety of MVC to keep their applications clean.

Salesforce development.
Knowledge of writing applications for Salesforce is not directly transferable to other disciplines, it still allowed me to learn and practice methods of controlling complexity, updating legacy (to me) code, and querying information from and persisting information to a database. Also, while in Salesforce land, I was able to practice object-oriented programming, which was a roller-coaster ride of "Yes, I totally get it!" and "I understand nothing!" feelings.

Version control systems.
I did quite a bit of research and reading on various version control systems. I researched not only the version control software tools themselves, but also the software project management practices that release processes that rely on these software tools. It's a complex topic that spans technical areas, human management, and gray-area decisions. While I learned about the comprehensive basics, I feel that there is still more practical stuff to learn.

Professional recognition.
I was invited to join the experts program, which places me as a bust on the masthead of my company's ship. I write well-crafted blog entries a few times a month, which give me an outlet for the technical thoughts in my head. I also set up a tech talk at work, for which I created a slideshow and practiced a talk that introduces the technical basics of Git. I presented the tool to the entire software team in a factual manner, and intend to give a follow-up presentation to discuss the release-management styles that are used with distributed version control systems. I am making it my goal to give more tech talks this year - a solid topic once per month.

Non-work related hobbies.
Besides work, I've decided to learn Mandarin Chinese. It's a challenging language, but I am enjoying studying it. It's far easier than Japanese grammatically, but I think that proper pronunciation will elude me for quite some time. It hasn't been my number one priority, which is software, so it only received ~10 hours per week, which I worry is not enough. I took a vacation to Taiwan in September to test my knowledge. I found that I can speak very little after just 2 months of studying, but it was enough for me to ask "Which way?" questions and "Please help me." phrases. I have learned a number of words now, enough so that I may be able to start chatting with Mandarin-speakers on the internet to learn more. Conversation flow and phrases is pretty difficult.

I hope 2012 brings me as far as 2011 brought me. As long as I keep improving and I'm recognized for it, I'll be happy working with my current company.

Post-read thoughts -
This paper seems like it was written by amateurs. Note that I am not a member of the academic community, nor do I write academic papers, so this is more of a comment on their writing style and their ability to defeat my BS filter (i.e. Can you prove that? How exactly do you define 'x'?).
Having said that, there are some useful ideas and interesting results from their interviews and research with real projects. Here's what I found interesting:

Studies show that branch usage greatly increases with new adoptees of DVC.

Pre-DVC, 1.54 branches/month. With-DVC, 3.67 branches/month (though I worry about methods used to obtain this info)

The idea that prior to DVC, branches were created only for releases, not new features.

To effectively use DVC branches, create one for each new feature, localized bug fix, or maintenance effort.

Studies show that even with DVC, a central repo is still used. (It is important to admit this, IMO)

An accessible DVC repo enables anyone to contribute to the project. Developers without commit privileges were reduced to working w/o VC. Accepting changes from unofficial project members has high barriers.

Academics advise us to checkpoint code at frequent intervals in a place separate from the 'team repo'. Only tested and stable code should be integrated into the 'team repo'. DVC systems enable and encourage this practice.

The term "Semantic conflict" - All VC systems are good at syntactic conflicts, but not semantic conflicts.

Awareness of
'Distract commits', which are commits that are required to resolve merge conflicts.

Abstract. The adoption of distributed version control (DVC), such as Git and
Mercurial, in open-source software (OSS) projects has been explosive. Why is
this and how are projects using DVC? This new generation of version control supports two important new features: distributed repositories, and history-preserving
branching and merging where branching is easier, faster, and more accurately
recorded. We observe that the vast majority of projects using DVC continue to
use a centralized model of code sharing, while using branching much more extensively than when using CVC. In this study, we examine how branches are
used by over sixty projects adopting DVC in an effort to understand and evaluate
how branches are used and what beneﬁts they provide. Through interviews with
lead developers in OSS projects and a quantitative analysis of mined data from
development histories, we ﬁnd that projects that have made the transition are
using observable branches more heavily to enable natural collaborative processes:
history-preserving branching allow developers to collaborate on tasks in highly
cohesive branches, while enjoying reduced interference from developers working
on other tasks, even if those tasks are strongly coupled to theirs

Introduction

Purpose of Version Control

Create isolated workspace from a particular state of the source code.

Can work within one branch without impacting other developers

Purpose of branches

Should be 'cohesive' so that a team can work together on a branch

Keeps new features separate, and allows merging features when complete

Monday, January 2, 2012

While I've been exploring various implementations of presentation patterns/frameworks in Javascript, I've started questioning the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern as a whole. What problems does it solve? How is it different competing presentation pattern ideas, such as MVP and MVVM? I'll use this blog post as a way to organize my findings and thoughts. I'll give a bit of history first, then give a bit of speculation at the end.

MVC is an architectural pattern, the purpose of which is mainly code organization and separation of concerns. It was conceived a long time ago (1979) by Trygve Reenskaug. He was a member of the Smalltalk community in the early days of GUI design, and took part in the early conversations of various patterns for organizing code when creating solutions for handling user input in a GUI context. He authored his first paper on MVC, titled THING-MODEL-VIEW-EDITOR, which details one such pattern. The community later distilled these terms, explained here, to become model, view, and controller, as defined in this revised paper.

It is important to note, however, that this architectural pattern was conceived before complex internet pages and internet applications were possible. Rather, this first conception of MVC was a GUI solution within the problem domain of desktop applications. I believe this style of MVC, which uses multiple layered views, is used on OS-level platforms, such as and now seems incongruent as a pattern for web app servers and page generation. Internet pages and internet applications have a much different set of limitations than desktop programs - the most notable of which include the stateless nature of HTTP and the added cost of sending data back and forth across the wire between the client and the server.

Because of the popularity of the MVC pattern, it was used as the pattern for delivering web pages in the internet age. Because of the differences in the problem domain, however, the pattern evolved to fit the new problem domain. It is possible that this general incompatibility was one of the central reasons for the many MVC spin-offs that have been conceived since then, though it is just pure speculation. An equally qualified reason would be that people started using MVC without fulling understanding the reasons behind the existing MVC, or without knowing that an existing MVC existed.

I wonder about the reader's thoughts. Do you think the reason for the proliferation of varying ideas of MVC is that the domain changed to the web? Or is it because people started using it while having a poor understanding of its reasoning and concepts? Is this a waste of the brain's processing time? Maybe, but I enjoy it.